Michael Gurr on the Gettysburg Address

As part of Radio National's celebration of Unforgettable Speeches, Michael Gurr ponders the lasting impact of the Gettysburg Address.

The Gettysburg Address is said to have re-shaped American ideas about freedom and democracy and re-defined the American Civil War in the national consciousness. It was delivered by President Abraham Lincoln on 19 November 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Battle of Gettysburg was one of the bloodiest in the American Civil War. It had lasted three days. There were 50,000 casualties.

The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Transcript

Michael Gurr: It's 270 words long – and was apparently interrupted by applause five times. It was recorded for God knows what reasons in the 1990s by Margaret Thatcher and General 'Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf.

Abraham Lincoln's speech at the dedication of the Civil War cemetery at Gettysburg has a kind of mythology around it – the kind of mythology that can prevent the thing itself from being seen for what it is.

It's come to represent a sort of moral fierceness that's inflated it to the size of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. Big and unapproachable except in a state of silent respect. You walk towards this speech as you might towards the Memorial itself: in compulsory humility.

Speechwriters use it as a kind of shorthand. Either for what they were trying for and did not achieve – or to describe what their job so demonstrably never involves:

'I'm working on a speech for a freeway opening. Gettysburg it ain't.'

It's also a speech that wears now a cloak of vague ideals – we vaguely know what it stood for and hear the words 'Gettysburg Address' with the same vaguely uplifting sentiment that we hear 'I have a dream...'

But it's a funeral speech. It aims very high but it lives with something six feet in the earth – a great regret for the dead. You can fairly hear the sob in it.

The star turn on 19 November 1863 wasn't Abraham Lincoln at all. The star turn was the most famous public speaker in America, Edward Everett. He'd been a governor, a senator, an ambassador. A crowd of 15,000 wasn't going to faze him.

Everett spoke to them for two hours, saying things like:

'You can now feel it – a new bond of union that they shall lie side by side on the perilous ridges of the battle. You can now feel it – a new bond of union that they lie side by side till a clarion, louder than that which marshalled them to combat, shall awake their slumbers.'

Everett knew the power of repetition, but his is a funeral speech of the more ordinary kind: the kind that ennobles the speaker, not the subject; the kind that wraps up calamity in comforting, familiar terms so that calamity is dispersed into the rhetorical fog. You know what's coming next: it's the sort of speech you hear and feel you could almost join in.

Predictability has its place at funerals, it's reassuring. But reassurance can be a kind of anaesthetic, an enemy of thought.

Give me a national disaster and I'll throw 'Amazing Grace' at it.

Edward Everett knew the gig. I doubt he was distracted by the fact that behind the crowd, people were picking over the battlefield for souvenir bullets.

By the time Lincoln got started, most of the crowd had drifted off: you couldn't blame them.

The first thing he said was plain enough:

'Fellow-countrymen – four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.'

It could be the beginning of a speech for a gathering of boy-scouts. But Lincoln understood the power of letting the occasion do a little speaking for itself. Instead of forcing the language to impose on the occasion, announce and dominate the occasion, he tells us a fact and lets the circumstances shiver around it. Coffins were still lying around on the Gettysburg battlefield. He didn't need to stand wailing on them.

Clive James once wrote a scathing review of a Liza Minelli TV special. Just bear with me. He said that Minelli sang as though it was her job to put meaning into the lyrics rather than get it out. He meant that if it was a beautiful song about heartbreak, the singer didn't really need to whimper and moan, but simply to sing it.

Lincoln knew he didn't need to put meaning into the dedication at Gettysburg. He knew he had to draw it out. He let Edward Everett do the Minelli thing.

And he goes on in the same way. He tells us that there's a war on and states the reason why we have gathered here: to dedicate a portion of the battlefield as a cemetery. So far, obvious enough.

But then he does a quite amazing gear-shift. He undermines – or affects to undermine – the whole purpose of the gathering. It's not us, he says, who can consecrate this ground, the dead have already done that. He tells us that his words will be forgotten, but not what the dead have done.

It's this putting-things-in-perspective that reaches past rhetoric and into the actual fact of the day. To be standing there listening to the speeches means you didn't do what the dead have done. It means your proper place isn't bellowing clouds of rousing bulldust, but feeling something much more grave. Resolving something much more humble.

'The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.'

It's the experience of many people, I think, and it's certainly mine, that an understanding of the human experience of war is often obscured by the hollow men – and so few of them soldiers – who stand between us and the people we want to understand, to think about. The officials and representatives who release rivers of words at memorial services, dedications, troop farewells and welcomings. They seem to be competing for poignancy, trying to outdo the things they describe with their language. What they actually achieve of course is not much more than a kind of bullying sentimentality.

How often have I wanted to turn down the volume, or ram my fingers in my ears – to get the cheer-squad off the stage?

The view is sometimes literally obscured. Arriving in New York on Memorial Day in 1986, it was hard to see the veterans past the crowd of urgers, pushing forward to have their photo taken next to someone who took a bullet. The barrackers cancel out reflection; they push away those who might truly love the veterans.

War speeches: they make you long for the minute's silence to last all day.

The speech at Gettysburg is not an urger's speech, though it does urge more effort in the civil war. It's not an urger's speech because Lincoln doesn't presume to know what it was like to be in battle. He doesn't try to steal courage and wear it as his own. He doesn't try to be mates with people he has never met. It's a more grown-up speech than that. Lincoln doesn't stand between us and the dead – he has the grace to stand slightly to one side, and gesture our attention towards them.

He talks about their courage – not his, not ours.

And this playing down of speeches is appealing.

'The world will little note nor long remember ...'

I don't think that this is aw-shucks humility – Lincoln wrote in his diary soon after that he doubted the impact of his speech; he thought that 'it would not scour.'

Still, it had been through many drafts, right up to the morning it was delivered; the only thing that Lincoln revealed about it beforehand was that it would be 'short, short, short.'

It's probably unfair to keep picking on Edward Everett, but compared to his two hours I think Lincoln's brevity is a mark of his respect. In the form of the speech he seems to say: This is not about me.

It's quite reassuring for anyone who's worked as a speechwriter to know that Lincoln's speech went through lots of drafts; also that he ripped some of it off. Five years before, the Reverend Theodore Parker had given an anti-slavery speech in Boston in which he talked about 'government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.' Lincoln's copy of Reverend Parker's speech has that passage circled in pencil. Thank God for that.

While speechwriters will sometimes use past speeches, I suspect it's usually more for solace than inspiration. To remind themselves that the task they are facing is not actually impossible.

And you can pick up the odd hint. Lincoln uses three words which aren't identical in meaning, but are a kind of repetition. He says '... we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow this ground.' Any one of those words alone would do. But each word would probably hit different people in different ways. Maybe 'dedicate' and 'hallow' don't strike any bells inside you, but 'consecrate' might. Good one to remember, that: cover your ground.

When John Kennedy was preparing for his inauguration in 1960, he asked his speechwriter Theodore Sorensen to study the Gettysburg address. What was its secret ? All Sorensen could come up with was that Lincoln used short words. It's a better answer than it seems.

But because the great speeches are so glued to their occasion, they are finally not much help. I've heard political speeches that have in some way bothered me as being 'not quite right' – as being slightly off-key – and wondered whether their author had got inspiration from the wrong place.

And a good deal of a speech's success is in the ability of the speaker to 'read the room', to change pitch or content to match the audience. We don't know what Lincoln's delivery was like – but at Gettysburg, without amplification or autocue, he must have known how to shout intimately.

It's interesting to watch political speeches now – after a brief flirtation with high-gloss presentation, the fashion is to use all the technology but to make it invisible – to build the illusion of the unadorned. To avoid the over-polished.

No-one seems to want to do it out-doors yet – the crowd control would be a nightmare – but in an effort to project modesty we're getting closer and closer to the art-directed hay-bale, to a hologram of the ordinary.

The speech given again and again in political campaigns is still called 'the stump speech' – in memory I guess of the speaker standing on a stump to deliver it. When he was briefly British prime minister, John Major actually had an assistant carrying around a soap-box during the campaign for the leader to stand on. It was meant to look down-home, and was of course the product of long meetings about style and presentation. It didn't do him much good.

All politicians are always campaigning, but Lincoln was doing something else as well. In the middle of a war, he was asking for 'increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion'. He was asking people not to cut and run. It's a powerful claim – heard now from White House – that to falter in a war is to dishonour those who have already died in it. To end any war unfinished must bring on a kind of confusing moral nausea – especially if you started it.

Lincoln's speech, though it asks for continued effort in a war, doesn't feel like the speech of a man who is enjoying the prospect very much. Knowing the context, it feels as stern with himself as it is with us.

When I heard Margaret Thatcher's recording of the Gettysburg Address, I dismissed it as the vanity of someone who had just enough insight to know that recording Churchill would have been a bridge too far for even the bluest of Tories. That deadly whisper trained up from ripped tin by some of England's best voice-teachers.

But also the falsity of the exercise, the stolen credibility of it. You couldn't help wondering how many copies were bought by the Falkland's wounded whom she expressly banned from marching in the victory parade. Only the robust were allowed out that day. The dead were safely dead – they can be bent to any purpose, but the wounded would have ruined the spectacle.

My copy of the Gettysburg Address is in a volume of collected speeches. Flicking back and forth between Robespierre and Emily Pankhurst, Mandela and Disraeli, it's surprising how few of them give you a sense of the physical surroundings in which they were spoken.

Lincoln does. In two short phrases.

'We are met on a great battlefield'

and:

'We have come to dedicate a portion of that field'

A 'great battlefield' could be anywhere. But 'a portion of that field' is somewhere very particular.

One reason it's a very big speech is because it's about a very small place.